My father’s death demolished me. It was perhaps because I had never properly grieved my mother’s leaving that I approached mourning him with fierce intention. Grieving, I learned, was a process of story construction. I needed to construct a story so I could reconstruct my world. There were decisions to make about what to put in and what to leave out.

The first time I rocked in the blue chair, it felt familiar. It felt like the kind of peace you find when floating in shallow water. It felt almost like sitting on my father’s lap. It comforted me like all the rocking chairs that had come before it. I rocked and rocked for hours. As I rocked, everything else seemed farther away, almost inaccessible: my desert room, my roommate playing video games on the other side of the door, the street below. Nowhere except the blue chair mattered. I wanted to rock forever.

When I came up gasping, my father grabbed me and tossed me back in. When I remember that day, I remember soaring through the air and landing with a splat. I remember myself unattached from everything and yet made of everything. I was the air and the water. I was made of living fragments. I was past, present, and future at once. I felt, more than ever before, and perhaps ever since, deliciously free.

Reading about madness convinces you that you are, in fact, going mad. But it also makes you feel real, like what is happening to you is happening to you. Most of the time, you feel as though what is happening to you is happening in someone else’s bad dream. In the dream, there is a chair, a blue chair that rocks when you rock it. Everything else—the rest of the world—rocks on its own and there is no way to make it stop.

It may be that what you could be haunts you. It is real. It is a weight you have to carry around. Each failure to become, to be, is a weight. Each state you could inhabit is a burden as heavy as any physical weight, but more so, because it weighs on your soul. It is the ghost of your possibilities hanging around your neck, an invisible albatross, potentials unknowingly murdered. The higher being you could be, if you could inhabit a higher state, also sits on you, increasing the tensions of your spirit, your moods, your irritations.